Former two-sport Clemson star a jack-of-all-trades

Mark Buchholz is the kind of monumental achiever that can inspire equal amounts of inspiration and jealousy from elite collegiate athletes down to your basic weekend warrior.If something is worth doing for the former Clemson football kicker and soccer player then it's worth taking to the extreme in pushing up to and beyond personal limitations.“All my friends or anyone remotely close to me knows how addictive my personality is competition-wise,” Buchholz said. “No matter what I get into I've always dove in 110 percent as far as if I'm going to play something I want to be the best at it or the best I can be at that particular endeavor.“I don't know where I get it from, maybe from competing against two older brothers who played every sport imaginable.”Of course the 27-year-old is blessed with a high level of natural athleticism that provides a basis for his intense competitive nature to allow him to have success at most anything he chooses. The most recent case would be his surprising qualification for the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship, an event so prestigious the winner annually receives an invitation to play the Masters.Buchholz took second place by three shots with a 68-68 last month to become one of only three to advance through qualifying in Canton, Ga. That gave him a total of 12 tournament rounds for his entire life, a number he will now expand starting Monday at Laurel Hill Golf Club in Lorton, Va.“Most of what I've played has been qualifiers for shot-in-the-dark tournaments like this one or the U.S. Amateur qualifier,” Buchholz said. “I think every official round I've played I've shot between 75-78 and just could never piece it all together. With the two days for the Public Links I was just much more relaxed than I had been before and made a tournament I never really thought I had a realistic chance of qualifying for.“I'm honestly lucky if I play a practice round once a week and it's definitely no more than four times a month. I do live on a golf course and am about a mile from the range so I do get to practice there about two or three times a week and I will go out to the green near my house and just chip and putt some until dark to keep my feel.”So what would induce a guy who is married with a child due in September to burn a few precious vacation days from his corporate job by taking on such a long-shot, one that evades even the most seasoned amateur players on a yearly basis?“Just because I've shot some really good numbers the last few years on some tough courses when I do get to play so I know the ability is there,” Buchholz said. “These one-day qualifiers are really the only feasible tournament rounds I can play with my job schedule and I don't have the golfing resume to get invited to some of the bigger amateur events in the Southeast because I never played in any junior events and nobody in the golfing world has any idea who I am.”He was certainly anonymous during his first big-time foray into golf when he attempted a U.S. National Amateur Championship qualifier and was paired up with Harris English, then a top-15 amateur in the world and currently a PGA Tour winner ranked 21st on the money list with $1.8 million.“I get on that first tee with him and I'm thinking to myself I hadn't prepared much over my life for that moment. I snap-hooked that first tee shot into the river on the left and made double-bogey before making three consecutive birdies and was actually tied with him through about 14 holes before I collapsed a bit down the stretch. That opened my eyes that I might be able to be pretty good and compete at golf.”But the main inspiration was a full-blown case of the butterflies, something Buchholz hadn't recalled experiencing since he was a 14-year-old playing on a soccer all-star team against the world's best young strikers over in England.“That's part of the excitement I get from playing in these tournaments because that nervousness and feeling is something I hadn't felt in over 10 years. Now all my competitive drive that I had toward soccer and then football is toward golf mostly because of that unique feeling.”Buchholz said he never experienced that angst while he was Clemson's two-year starting kicker and making 37 of 57 career field goals (including a walk-off 35-yarder that ended a 23-21 victory at South Carolina in 2007) and a school-record 88-for-88 in extra-point tries. He never felt such pressure as a four-year starter on the soccer team where he helped lead the Tigers to the 2005 Final Four and a final No. 9 ranking the following season.His motto has always been if you are confident that you've prepared to your utmost capacity for whatever it is you are trying to achieve then nerves shouldn't come into play. But then again that's a little easier to believe when things just seem to come natural to you and you're willing to put in the work.“He's the most athletic person I've ever met in my entire life and he's got such a competitive attitude no matter what he does,” former Clemson golfer and S.C. Amateur champion Luke Hopkins said. “He's just determined he's going to be the best and he's going to do something until he gets good at it.”Hopkins laughed as he remembers their epic college battles at video games such as Halo or Guitar Hero and once his good friend took up golf and began to get close with many on the Clemson team, he took the competitiveness up a notch.“He was probably a 10 to 12 handicap starting out as a sophomore in college and he was always wanting to go to the range with me,” Hopkins said. “I went to visit him after college and he shot 68 both days we played and I laughed and asked him how in the world he could be beating me at my own sport. It honestly blows my mind how he can do things when he puts his mind to it.”Buchholz would play only a handful of times a year growing up before the lure of having Clemson's golf course close to his apartment was too much to pass up. He began giving it a try and suddenly golf became his respite from soccer, football and studies while spending up to six hours a day practicing when the time was free. He also found the time to be an intramural champion in both basketball and badminton at Clemson in addition to being selected to multiple All-ACC Academic teams.Now a sales rep for Sherwin-Williams in Georgia, Buchholz has won the company's prestigious President's Club Award two years running which earned him and his wife, Katie, a pair of free trips to Hawaii. He even squeezed in three triathlons over the past few years, including one last month. If you think that competitive streak might be tough for a wife to handle at times, think again.“When it comes down to being a husband and about to become a dad, I think his drive to be the very best spills over into those areas as well,” Katie Buchholz said. “He wants to do fantastic at work and practice golf, but then still come home and be a good husband at night. He always makes time for things like going to every one of my prenatal doctor appointments and doing projects for the nursery.“I don't know how he gets it all accomplished and I think it might begin to wear me down if he didn't put as much effort into our relationship as everything else so it's never taken away from anything we have.”

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